The Internet continues to experience exponential growth and so does content and information that are available via the Internet. For example, full length movies are now readily available over the Internet. Moreover, enterprises have made nearly all their records, transactions, and services available via World-Wide Web (WWW) browsers. Of course a variety of security mechanisms and protocols are also used in an effort to ensure proper security for accessing certain types of sensitive information.
Although storage devices have become less expensive and are being made with increasingly larger storage capacities, enterprises are still finding that storage maintenance, support, and growth are issues that regularly have to be addressed. This is so, due to a variety of ongoing issues such as: the need for high availability of information in the marketplace, the need for information versioning, and the need to account for exponential information growth. Accordingly, enterprises are determining that their storage needs are often outpacing the higher capacity storage devices, which are currently available in the industry.
However, nearly every appliance made today includes connection capabilities to the Internet and includes some form of data storage. Much of this storage capacity goes largely unused or is grossly underutilized. Enterprises have no practical and automated mechanism to manage and use this excess capacity in an efficient manner. As a result, enterprises continue to believe that the solution to their storage concerns is to continue to added storage devices to the enterprise's network. This means that the number of devices being managed by enterprises is proliferating at alarming rates and the wasted utilization for many of these devices continues to grow at the same time.
Thus, improved and automated techniques are desirable for providing efficient storage utilization and storage management.